Another Soft Song
by cruiscin lan
Summary: Future fic. Puck and Rachel are having problems in their marriage. Spoilers up to "Sectionals," warning for mature content more specific warning within .


**Just a warning - this fic deals with miscarriage and contains mature scenes.**

* * *

It had been another long day in a long week in a long month, and when he saw Rachel's car already in the driveway of their home, he knew something was up. She normally ran choir practice on Thursdays (it was like glee club, except noncompetitive), staying after school for hours working with those miserable McKinley High students. She'd become someone like Mr. Schue, trying to live her failed dreams vicariously by going into education, and Puck worried that their marriage was going the same route as the Schuesters' had.

"Rachel?" he called out as he let himself in. She didn't reply. After he took off his coat and tossed it across the back of the couch, he peered into the kitchen, the dining room, down the hall to the second bedroom - no sign of her. The door to their bedroom was closed, and he held his breath for a moment, almost afraid to go in. He turned the knob and eased the door open slowly. The curtains were drawn, and the tiny sliver of light from the hallway came at an angle into the room. A soft song was playing on the clock-radio next to the bed, but Puck didn't recognize the song.  Rachel was curled up on her side of the bed, facing away with the covers pulled up over her. She turned in bed, and when her eyes met his, he could tell she'd been crying.

"Hey," she said simply, with a weariness in her voice that threw him.

"Hey," he replied. "What are you doing home?"

She ignored the question at first, instead pulling the covers aside and beckoning him to join her. "Come here," she told him. "Come lie next to me."

He sighed and wondered what the hell she was thinking. He'd just come back from work, covered in grime from repairing jammed toilets all day. "Rach..." he began, intending to protest, but he was quickly interrupted.

"I'm losing it," she said.

"You're... what?" He hoped she didn't mean what he thought she meant. She could be losing any number of things - her mind, her job - just not _that_, he thought, please not _that_.

"The baby," Rachel replied, and Puck's heart sank into his stomach. "I'm losing the baby."

"Shit, Rachel, shouldn't you go to the hospital?" He didn't mean to sound so angry, but why was she lying in bed, doing _nothing_?

"I already called my doctor. She said it's still early, to just wait and watch. I don't want to go to the hospital unless I have to."

"But can't you, I don't know, make it stop? Can't you fix it?" There was a crack in his voice when he spoke.  Rachel shook her head solemnly as fresh tears sprang to her eyes, and Puck finally slipped off his work boots and climbed into bed with her, taking her in his arms and pressing his face into her hair.

* * *

Puck was always on edge when Rachel was home earlier than he was. She'd always been a motivated person, more invested in her work than he was in his. Besides that, he had suspected lately that by spending all her extra time at school she was avoiding him. Much of their relationship was built around bad decisions - hooking up with one another all through high school, even when they were both with other people, marrying before Rachel finished school, choosing to stay in Lima instead of taking the chance and going to New York or L.A., where Rachel would have at least had a chance at making her dreams come true. After nearly four years of marriage, their bad decisions were starting to wear them down, and their relationship was wearing thin.

So when he'd seen her car in the driveway before he'd gotten home a few weeks ago, he was naturally a little nervous. When he walked in, she was in the kitchen, obsessively scrubbing the sink. She cleaned when she needed a distraction, and considering how much elbow grease she was putting into this particular chore, Puck figured something _really_ bad was on her mind.

"Hey," he said loudly, trying to get her attention over the sound of the stereo blaring. She was so intent on scrubbing she didn't seem to notice his arrival. When she didn't respond, he turned the music down. "What are you doing home? I thought you had, like, an appointment today or something."

"It was at two," she said without even looking up. "I came straight home afterwards."

"Okay," Puck said, crossing his arms. "How did it go?"

She drew in her breath slowly and set down her sponge and let the yellow rubber gloves slide of her hands. She finally raised her gaze to meet his and said "I need you to sit down."

There was a formality in her tone that Puck wasn't prepared for, and his mind immediately leapt to his worst fear. "You're leaving me," he whispered.

"Noah..." Rachel said, rolling her eyes. "Don't jump to conclusions."

But Puck had already started shaking his head, launching into a litany of "Rachels" and "pleases" and "don'ts" as he put his hands on her shoulders. "I know we're having problems, Rach, but we can do this. We _can_. Just... just gotta give it a chance, and then..."

His pleadings did more to annoy her than anything else. "Would you calm down already? I need to _talk_ to you," she said sharply.

"Okay," Puck said, raising his hands in the air. "Okay, I'm calm."

"I went to the doctor today to get an IUD," she began to explain. "I didn't want to take any chances after... after _you know_."

She didn't have to go into detail; the allusion she was making was clear, and Puck's gaze fell guiltily to the floor. "I told you I was sorry about that."

"It's too late for sorry," she snapped back, but she instantly regretted the way she sounded; she bit her lip and shook her head and breathed in deeply.

"So what's an IUD?" Puck asked. He was smarting from Rachel's last remark, and he couldn't stop himself from getting angry; besides that, when he was in school McKinley had adhered to an abstinence-only education policy, which left him clueless about many forms of contraception. "Does that mean, like, we're never going to have kids? This is probably something we should have talked about before you went ahead and made a decision. I mean, you're my _wife_, Rachel. We're supposed to be a _family_. You can't leave me out of decisions like this. I might like to have kids, you know. Maybe not now, maybe not for a few years, but..."

"You're getting ahead of yourself _again_," Rachel interrupted. "Whenever I say I need to talk to you never _listen_."

"Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?" Puck asked.

"Overreact, apparently," she shot back.

Puck was really incensed now. "I'm sorry, how's a husband _supposed_ to react when his wife's gone and sterilized herself?"

"That's not _at all_ what an IUD does," Rachel sneered, "and besides that, I didn't even _get_ it."

Puck groaned and smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. This conversation was causing more trouble than it was worth. "Well, if you didn't go through with it then why _the fuck_ are we talking?"

"I would have gotten it except I'm already pregnant," she said all at once.

Puck's arms fell to his sides; he didn't even know how to react. "Oh shit," he muttered, still processing.

"I know," Rachel mumbled. "That's what _I_ said." She folded her arms, but a sudden sob caught in her throat. She raised one hand to her mouth as she tried to fight off tears.

"Rach, I'm..." Puck started, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean what I said."

"Noah, please don't -" she objected, but he squeezed her tighter and she couldn't keep from crying any longer. She pressed her face against his smelly work clothes and wept while he caressed her back, shushing and sighing.

* * *

They lay like that in silence for a long while. She'd stopped crying after a while, letting her chest rise and fall with the same cadence as his.

"Why, though?" Puck suddenly asked. "Why is this happening?"

"I don't know," Rachel whispered in reply.

"You weren't lifting anything heavy, were you?" he asked. He didn't understand how this could be one of those things that _just happen_. He needed a reason, an explanation.

"I've been bleeding for days, Noah," she told him.

"Why didn't you do or say anything sooner, then?"

"I don't know," Rachel said, her voice wavering with emotion. "I didn't know what was happening. I thought it was normal. And then it just got... it just got worse."

There was a pause, and then Puck spoke again. "Was it because we didn't plan it?"

"Don't be stupid," Rachel whispered, pulling away from him a little and squeezing her eyes shut as she buried her face into her pillow.

* * *

The only thing they had going for them any more was their sex life.

When they first got married - well, honestly, even _before_ they were married - they made love almost every day, often more than once. And even though they didn't engage one another intimately nearly as often as they used to, they discovered that there was truth to the adage that practice makes perfect.

One night when she returned late from giving private singing lessons, she found Puck laying in bed, reading by the light of the bedside lamp. "Hey, babe," he said, without looking up.

"I have been wearing these shoes for fifteen hours," Rachel replied. It was the sort of thing that passed as a greeting between the two of them nowadays. "My feet are _killing_ me."

Puck looked up from his magazine, his eyebrows peaked. "Maybe a foot massage?"

"I don't know, Noah, I'm so _tired_..."

"A foot massage, nothing more, I promise," Puck said, smiling, but he knew full well that was a promise he didn't intend to keep.

Rachel knew it too, but she sighed and flopped beside him on the bed, pushing one foot into his lap. "They're all yours," she said, wiggling her toes.

Puck shot up, unable to stand the smell of her feet in such close proximity. "I'll be right back," he told her, and while Rachel was trying to decide whether to laugh or be angry, he took two washcloths and ran them under the hot water in the sink. They were still steaming when he wrung out all the excess water. They were almost too hot to hold when he brought them back into the bedroom and laid one across each of Rachel's feet. "How's that?" he asked, taking one foot in his hands and massaging it through the terry cloth.

"That feels nice," Rachel admitted, leaning back against the headboard with a satisfied smile. "Where did you pick up this trick?"

"Used to do it after football," he replied. "Helps loosen up tight muscles." He glanced up at her with a devious smile. "You have any _other_ tight muscles I could loosen up for you, ma'am?"

"Oh, that's just gross," Rachel said, but still her smile widened.

"You know, Rach, you really are living the dream. A lot of women fantasize about doing the plumber."

"Did you get propositioned at work again today? Because if that's the case then -"

"No," Puck interrupted before Rachel got carried away. "I'm just telling you that I am an expert on your pipes."

"Oh, please."

"And I'd like to introduce you to my plumbing snake," Puck continued. "It's thick, but agile, and it's got this power-wash function that'll clean you right out."

"These are the _worst_ pick up lines in the history of _ever_."

"Then thank god I'm already married," he said, tossing the cooled washcloths to the floor and sidling up beside Rachel in the bed. He playfully took a wisp of her hair between his fingers, trying to gauge her reaction before going any further.

Their eyes met for a second, until Rachel looked up to the ceiling. "All _right_," she finally acceded. "But you better make it worth the effort."

That was the cue Puck had been waiting for. Without another moment's hesitation, he kissed her passionately, almost violently, as he began unbuttoning her blouse. She let her hands wander beneath his Hanes undershirt, tracing the ripples between his muscles. They lost their clothing article by article - blouse, bra, undershirt, pajama pants, slacks, panties - and before long their naked bodies were pressing wildly up against one another.

"Condom?" she said breathlessly.

Puck opened the drawer to the nightstand and shuffled through their supply of prophylactics. "These are all wrappers," he said.

"Noah, you should throw those out immediately after you use them," Rachel said, disgusted that they had a whole drawer full of garbage next to their bed. "There's _none_ in there?"

"I can't find any," Puck answered, sharing her frustration.

"Why didn't you think to get more? You were just at the store, like, two hours ago."

"Well, why don't _you_ ever get them?"

"It's always been _your_ responsibility, Noah. I keep track of everything else - the cooking, the cleaning, the budget, the taxes. This is the _one_ thing you've ever been in charge of."

Puck was exasperated. "Well, what do you want me to do? Run out now and get some?"

"Don't be stupid," Rachel snapped. "It's almost eleven o'clock at night."

Puck ran his hand through his hair, struggling to think of an option that wouldn't end with blue balls or rubbing one out in the shower by himself. "I could pull out," he suggested.

Rachel furrowed her brow at him. "Are you sure?"

"We've been married for, what, four years?" Puck asked. "I think you can trust me by now."

"Fine," Rachel acceded. "As long as you know what you're doing."

He rolled his eyes at her. He'd relied almost entirely on pulling out all through high school (condoms were expensive, and most of his pool-cleaning money was spent on dip) and it had only failed the _one_ time. Her attitude took some of the wind from his sails, but once he slid into her it felt so good he nearly lost himself instantly.

"Oh, my god, Rachel," Puck groaned.

Rachel watched as he closed his eyes and lifted his head, his mouth skewing at an odd angle across his face. It was an expression she knew well, and she was afraid of what it meant. "Noah, are you..."

"Don't move," he moaned. "If you move, I'm going to come."

"I thought you knew what you were doing," Rachel huffed, twisting to escape his grip on her hips.

The motion was more than Puck could handle. "Don't move! Don't move! Don't move!" he yelled, but by then it was too late.

Rachel was disgusted with him. "You're unbelievable," she griped.

"You're just too sexy for me," Puck said with a small smile, trying to allay her agitation with tender words as he reached up and played with a wisp of her hair between his fingers.

"Nice try," she told him humorlessly.

* * *

They lay together in bed for a while. Rachel's body curved into his, and he wrapped his arms protectively around her. They used to sleep like this, but slowly they had inched away from each other as they slept, ending up at opposite ends of the bed without touching. They hadn't had intimacy like this in a long time.

As Puck shifted his weight in the bed, he brushed his hand against her stomach by accident. He pulled it away when he realized what he'd done. "Does it hurt?" he asked, afraid.

"Cramps," Rachel replied in a reassuring way, picking up on his concern. "It's really bad cramps, that's all."

"Is there anything I can do?" As he asked, he sat up in bed and started taking off his shirt.

"No," she told him. "Wait. I like you here. I like you here next to me."

Puck threw his legs over the side of the bed as he continued to undress. Once his shirt came off, his socks were the next to go. "At least let me take off my clothes."

"You're like a giant heating pad," she told him.

"As long as I'm up, can I get you anything?" he suggested, standing to remove his pants. "Water, even?"

Rachel considered his offer for a moment. "Okay," she muttered. "That would be nice."

Puck watched her draw the covers back over herself, trying to keep warm in his absence. He risked another suggestion. "We can always try again."

She pulled the comforter over her face, muffling her voice. "I don't want to talk about it right now," she told him.

"Sorry," Puck mumbled. "It's just... I was starting to..."

Rachel let the covers fall away from her face, and their eyes met for the first time all night. "I know," she said. "I was, too."

* * *

He couldn't get out of work to go with her to the doctor - one of the worst parts of living paycheck to paycheck - but he had dropped her off and he made sure he was there to pick her up. She was waiting on a bench outside, leaning against the stucco exterior of the building, staring off into space with her hands folded around her purse. When he pulled up, she rose slowly to her feet and let herself into the car.

"Hey," he said, putting the car into park.

"Hey," she replied, meeting his eyes in the rearview mirror.

"Well - how did it go?"

She sighed, and her fingers fluttered nervously in an ambiguous gesture. "They did a D&C," she said, "just to make sure... it was all... you know."

Puck turned towards her, concerned. "Did it hurt?"

"They used, like, local anesthesia and told me to take it easy for a while." She couldn't seem to stop moving her hands as she talked. "We have Tylenol at home, right?"

"I'm pretty sure we do, but if you want we can stop on the way home and get some."

"No, that's okay, I believe you. I just want to go back to bed."

A soft song started playing on the radio as Puck put the car back into drive. Once they were on the road, he turned towards her again, unable to stop himself from asking. He'd never seen her so solemn, so serious. "Are you sad?"

"Yeah." Her voice wavered in reply, and from the corner of his eye he could make out the glittering of a tear in hers. Her hands finally relaxed in her lap.

"Me too," he admitted, and they drove on without speaking for a while, until they pulled into the driveway of their home. Puck turned the car off, but the radio played on. The volume was so low that the words were inaudible, but there was something reassuring in just having the noise there to fill in the gaps of silence between them.

"I don't even know _why_ I'm sad," Rachel said, her words coming from somewhere out of the blue. "I never really wanted kids. I always thought - well _maybe_ I'd have kids someday, but only after I was thirty-five, and I'd made my mark on Broadway, or won a Grammy, or... I don't know. None of _that_ has happened either, so I don't know why I'm so upset about something that wasn't ever in the plan." She seemed startled by her unexpected outpouring; her brows were furrowed in confusion as she shook her head and struggled to understand her own feelings. She turned to her husband and asked "Why are _you_ sad?"

Puck had never been articulate when it came to expressing his feelings, so he sat back in the driver's seat and drew in a slow breath. "As far back as I can remember," he began, "I've _wanted_ kids, Rachel. I can remember _being_ a kid, and life was shitty in so many ways, and I would tell myself that when I had a family, they were going to have it so much better. And with Quinn, I thought I almost had it, but, I mean, it's good things went the way they did, because our daughter ended up with parents who love her _and_ could take care of her way better than two teenagers could have. But, like, I've always wanted another chance at it - you know, parenthood. Family."

They looked at one another again, one crying and the other struggling not to.

"Maybe it will happen again," Puck said finally. "Maybe it'll work out better next time."

Rachel was pensive for a minute, staring at her hands as she was lost in though. When she spoke, her voice was low "If it happened again, that'd be okay," she replied. "But I don't think we should, you know, force it."

"What do you mean?" Puck asked. He put his own hand between hers, squeezing her fingers in an affectionate way. "You don't want to try?"

Rachel looked up, meeting his eyes briefly before she turned and looked out the windshield. With her one hand in Puck's, she lifted her other to wipe the tears from her cheeks. "A baby would be..." she started soberly, but the right words weren't coming out that way. Her pitch rose and her words started flowing much faster, much more like the Rachel Berry that Puck knew and loved. "Okay, on the one hand, a baby would be a wonderful thing. My dads would be ecstatic, and your mom could finally stop pestering me..."

"My mom does not _pester_," Puck interjected.

"... and I think you'd make a really, really good father, Noah," Rachel said. "But I don't think _I'm_ ready." She paused for a moment, as though she didn't know how she felt until she'd admitted it out loud. While Puck's face fell into an expression of confusion, she tried to explain. "There's just been _so many_ things I've wanted to do, and I haven't done any of them. It's not that having a child would get in the way of reaching my dreams - but it would change things. I don't think I could handle all that change right now. I don't think _we_ could handle it right now."

Puck's voice caught in his throat. "I love you, Rachel," he told her, stilted and sorrowful. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

"I love you too," Rachel replied, sniffling now as her lips quivered. "But that's not the same as being _in love_, and you know it. A baby wouldn't fix what we've broken; if anything, it would just make it harder to fix. We need to work on our marriage before... before we decide anything else."

The soft song on the radio ended, and for the first time the two of them were caught in a space empty of sound.

"All right," Puck said finally, determined. "Let's fix this first."

Rachel weaved her fingers through his as another soft song began to play.


End file.
